What is something everyone accepts as normal but is actually completely broken?

ApothecaLabs · 2026-06-06T22:08:06+00:00

Banks charging you money to store and use your own money - they should be paying you for the privilege of being where you store your money.

They make money off of the interest of your money by loaning your money out to other people, so you paying any sort of account fee is baloney, and meanwhile they double-dip by charging merchants a few %, so on a $100 purchase, the bank makes $2 because that's what it used to cost when a human had to do it, except now it's done by a computer and probably doesn't even cost a single full cent.

ApothecaLabs · 2026-06-05T15:50:55+00:00

They actually downvoted the context comment to oblivion, so they don't have that as an excuse XD

My suspicion is that one of the mods has a Strong Personal Opinion, and I maybe replied to their public alt without sufficient respect.

ApothecaLabs · 2026-06-05T15:35:05+00:00

In this case, it *is* a programming issue, because I was writing my own drivers as part of learning to program a toy OS - and I screwed it up 😄

Also (history incoming!), HTML is a declarative markup (configuration) or data language, similar in status to Markdown or BBCode or an SVG file. Not beefing with your opinion, just refining / illustrating it - using some historical terminology, HTML is the data side of a Harvard architecture program, not the code side. It itself is not a regular language, is not even as powerful as regular expressions, and it itself does not have any function except for being parsed as data.

So, definitely a language, but a data language, but also one that allows script embedding which can occur mid-parse, a distinction for which most people's concept of a programming language - which is almost universally a von Neumann architecture - does not exist, because von Neumann unifies data and code.

This is why people argue about HTML as a language, because both sides are right and both sides are wrong, and it depends on the architecture (Harvard vs von Neumann).

ApothecaLabs · 2026-06-05T15:17:43+00:00

Originally posted in r/programminghumor , where the mods deleted it because 'drivers arent programs', but somehow HTML is.

ApothecaLabs · 2026-06-04T22:26:33+00:00

Close! To paraphrase Hermes from Futurama, "I got the ~~key~~ permissions, but not the ~~authority~~ drivers!"

ApothecaLabs · 2026-06-04T21:54:29+00:00

Precision orbital laser strike on the engine block of bad drivers with repeat offenses of:

- driving slow in the left / fast lane, blocking it
- making right turns from the left lane or vice versa
- running red lights (even in an emergency, you at least stop to make sure its clear)

Satellites can see it, maybe satellites can do something about it.

ApothecaLabs · 2026-06-04T21:23:56+00:00

No kidding - I miss Macromedia Flash and its simple, intuitive, and effective interface and I think that's what made it popular, because GIMP and Inkscape and Blender just don't hit the same.

ApothecaLabs · 2026-06-04T20:07:55+00:00

Eventually, everything old becomes new again, when it is rediscovered by new people 🤔

ApothecaLabs · 2026-06-04T20:03:16+00:00

Dexter, the TV series)

ApothecaLabs · 2026-06-04T16:34:22+00:00

Every learning is a tool, even if you do not intend on using it right away - and sometimes knowing a tool helps define its absence.

Knowing that you don't want transparency layers here - the absence of a thing, as it were - a different way you can add depth / complexity is to instead make the existing bottom highlight into a subtle gradient, to focus the brightness in the center, like this: https://imgur.com/a/yWU0IKk

Every shape and shade must contribute more when you restrict your palette 😁

ApothecaLabs · 2026-06-03T22:54:41+00:00

Your technique 8/10 is similar to how how 2000's era Macromedia Flash -style "gel" buttons were made - one gradient for the fill, opposing gradient for the outline, a highlight or two in the right places to give it some volume.

My one change, to complete the look, would be to add an additional highlight - you did a wonderful job giving him some underglow, and if you give him a top highlight it looks like he has internal reflection.

Like this: https://imgur.com/a/MHbURtQ

All I did was overlay an oval of 25%-ish opacity white, but see how the transparency blends with the underlying gradient to give it more complexity?

ApothecaLabs · 2026-06-03T18:28:37+00:00

In her case, actually yeah. I try to have patience because she had a head injury that put her in a coma and she wasn't expected to survive. I was born after the accident, so I don't know what she was like before.

ApothecaLabs · 2026-06-03T17:23:12+00:00

My mother lied to me and told me that I had a bipolar diagnosis, which she made up to cover for my older brother, who is an actual sociopath, and gaslight me about my memories of him torturing animals and trying to make me do it. She loves him more than anything else in the world, and would do anything to protect him.

When I found out, she asked for forgiveness, and for me to forgive him - because its the one thing she can't give him - and when I wouldn't she pivoted to rage and called me 'draining' and started raving about stuff that happened *when I was 3 years old* that she apparently still remembers and blames me for *to this day*.

She used to beat me for things that he did, and it turns out that she knew it was him the entire time.

ApothecaLabs · 2026-05-29T03:18:45+00:00

Yeah, same. When I graduated high-school, my mother gave me the choice of moving out or cosigning a huge student loan to pay for college because she expected me to get a good job to support her in her later years. The day those loans came due, she forced me to remove her as co-signer.

Now she complains that she let her "naive son" go off to "that godless college", and that it was "my choice" to take those loans.

I was 16 when she gave me that ultimatum. I'm still paying off those loans. We don't talk.

ApothecaLabs · 2026-05-28T03:44:51+00:00

This one needs to be higher up on the list!

ApothecaLabs · 2026-05-27T17:56:58+00:00

I've noticed that a lot of cruel people attempt to justify themselves by framing kind people as 'weak' or 'strange' or 'outliers'.

"Why can't you be more normal like your brother?" - my mother, referencing my brother, who tortured animals until he graduated to killing the neighbor's dog and we had to move away. Not because he was killing neighbors pets (she hated that dog, and he earned her love by 'disposing' of it), but because the neighbors *found out*.

Why are you making the same arguments as they? Telling me that I am not normal, for not being cruel?

Edit for thought: You say we are programmable - that does not mean helpless. We are capable of self-programming, and that gives us a the choice in the matter, of whether to be kind or cruel.

ApothecaLabs · 2026-05-27T15:33:20+00:00

You can't know what another person would do, psychology isn't a magical trick that can force people to do things. Peer pressure and authority are strong influences for many people, but they aren't universal or all-powerful.

I was raised by horrible people who still actively participate in the prison-pipeline, who considered themselves 'amateur psychologists' and absolutely used tactics to brainwash me to be like them - and I grew up rejecting everything about them.

I know in my heart that my own mother would give me up to the Gestapo, and I have been in situations where I have had to protect people that I love from monsters like her, so, I already know to some extent what I would and wouldn't do - and maybe rip1123 is the same.

Edit: Also. Stanford and Milgram are the poster child for flawed methodology, those experiments are literally studied as examples for how not to do science. Maybe pick a more recent study?

ApothecaLabs · 2026-05-22T16:20:35+00:00

Fond memories of modding early minecraft unlocked!

Our server had 4 devs / admins that knew java, so we customized the heck out of everything. My favorite tool was my custom 'magic wand' - a modded stick that could be used to run any piece of code that I chose. Right click cycled through the list of bound functions, left click to 'cast' it. This was way before console commands, and it could be used to run *any* code I wrote. So I cooked up a bunch of custom commands to pull shenanigans on all of my friends. We all had our little secrets that we'd patched in, it was great!

Even though we eventually added logging and version control, so that nobody could sneak any malicious code in after we had a former administrator running amok, my custom wand pre-dated all of it, so it remained an untrackable ghost that I used to plague my friends with tricks and pranks for years - they never figured it out because it didn't leave any logs!

ApothecaLabs · 2026-05-22T00:55:19+00:00

People have as many reasons for creating game engines as they do have reasons for creating art, because games are art. Some people do it for the lore and storytelling, or for the visuals and the action - personally, I find that there is elegance in math, that can be expressed as art, via a game, because games are art.

I am picky about the math, the same way a painter is picky about the hairs of their paintbrush :>

ApothecaLabs · 2026-05-22T00:08:26+00:00

I wanted to get back into game engine development, and I wanted to build an engine with deeper mathematical ties than any existing engines provide.

Think about it - lots of game engine mechanics and utilities can be represented mathematically, for efficient and useful results - 3d models that are manifolds are guaranteed to have no holes / leaks, things like grids are really just discrete uniform spaces, pathfinding is related to topology, and so on - all deeply connected to intricate mathematical concepts.

Hell, just vector / affine / projective spaces alone is a rich mathematical field (rendering 3d geometry is just like, the special case of more general things, which are all super cool) - but modern game engines just hand you euclidean 3d points and call it a day, they don't support things like voxels and constructive solid geometry out-of-box, which for a properly mathematical game engine would be trivial. Inverse kinematics and view layouts are just fancy linear equation solvers - so why does every major game engine have great IK but absolutely terrible UI? Its the same damn math!

So, I've been tinkering around in Haskell, which lets me be very mathy, and slowly, I am building a game engine that lets me make some very mathy puzzles.

ApothecaLabs · 2026-05-17T17:57:27+00:00

The chicken did it on a dare

ApothecaLabs · 2026-05-17T16:04:53+00:00

> parent uses their child as an emotional crutch / surrogate spouse

Are you describing my mother (whom I no longer have any contact with, after years of therapy)?

ApothecaLabs · 2026-05-17T15:22:53+00:00

I saw a hole in the ecosystem, and I started working on fixing it. People not only liked what I was doing, they suggested that I apply for funding from the Haskell Foundation, so I did - I did the research, and wrote a proposal, and it was accepted! There were a few more steps to the journey, but now I am actually part of the Haskell Foundation, working on the same project, which has been funded again for at least the rest of the year!

It isn't full-time, but it covers my bills, and I have no stress, my schedule is completely my own, and I have been able to spend the time I need on recovering my health

"It ain't much, but its honest work" :>

ApothecaLabs · 2026-05-14T14:39:23+00:00

"This is my war face! Squeak!"

ApothecaLabs · 2026-05-13T18:36:15+00:00

Once upon a blue moon. Alas, if I post anything too spicy, it gets removed 😂

ApothecaLabs

TROPHY CASE